Jasmine is hurriedly collecting up the letter tiles and folding the Scrabble board. So helpful, I think, smiling at her. She stiffens, no doubt worried that I’ve turned my attention to her.
‘You were going to lose anyway,’ I tell her kindly. ‘My father had “kumquat”. You can’t compete with an exotic fruit.’
The door bangs open. Dominic is back with the phone. He passes it to my father, his gaze on my face.
‘And the hero returns, his mission accomplished.’ I flop with mock relief, one hand pressed to my forehead. ‘Thank God for that. We can all relax now.’
‘Cat,’ Mum says, pleading with me now.
‘That’s not my name.’
Dad stops pressing buttons on the phone and looks at me. His face is drained of colour.
‘Fuck,’ he says under his breath.
‘My name is not Catherine,’ I say loudly, just to be clear, and look around the room at every face. Even the kitten is staring at me from behind Mum’s legs. I make a loud ‘shoo!’ at him and he makes a dash for the utility room. That makes me laugh.
‘Yes, it is,’ my mother says stubbornly. ‘You were christened Catherine.’
‘But I renounced that name, didn’t I?’ I smile at Dominic, who looks back at me in shock. ‘That sounds rather impressive, doesn’t it?’ I say. ‘Kind of preachy too. Like renouncing the devil.’ I put on a deep pulpit voice that echoes about the kitchen. ‘I renounce thee, Catherine, in the name of the Lord!’
‘You’re still Cat to us.’
‘Oh, Mummy.’ I put my hands on my hips and tip my head to one side, mocking her. ‘Was I a terrible disappointment? Of course I was. Your only child, and a complete nutjob. It must have been hard for you to call in Doctor Holbern. Admitting to the world that you couldn’t cope with naughty little Catherine.’
‘Don’t,’ she begs me.
Dad has got through to someone on the phone.
‘Yes, hello. It’s Robert Bates. I’d like to talk to Dr Holbern. It’s urgent.’ He glances at me, then pushes past Dominic and goes into the hall to talk. The door bangs behind him but we can still hear him talking. I hear the word ‘relapse’.
‘What does he mean, relapse?’ I say. ‘This isn’t a relapse. It’s a return to normal service. A very welcome return, as far as I’m concerned.’
Dominic holds out his hand to me.
After a short hesitation, I take it, and watch our fingers interlace. He’s still my husband, after all. And he fucks like a jackhammer.
‘What is a jackhammer?’ I ask. ‘I’ve always wondered.’
He blinks.
‘A jackhammer?’ he repeats.
I turn to Mum. ‘What was in that urn, seriously?’ She doesn’t answer, but glances at Dominic.
Then I realise and look at him. ‘So you were in on it too,’ I say softly.
His jaw works, his gaze locked with mine.
‘I knew some of it, yes,’ he says. ‘But only because I needed to know. When we first talked about getting married, Robert gave me a call. We met up and he . . . well, he explained about your past, and what married life might be like for us. What could potentially happen. The signs to look out for.’
‘And you accepted the challenge. Wow.’ I smile, genuinely moved. For a moment, I drop the ironic tone. ‘Well done, you. I was wrong to take the piss before. You are a hero, Dominic.’
He says nothing, although his hand tightens around mine.
‘But the question stands,’ I say, raising my chin as I face my mother. ‘What was in that urn? Not the ashes of some unfortunate neighbourhood moggy, I hope. Because it wasn’t Rachel, let’s face it.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ Jasmine bursts out, and we all look at her, surprised.
‘Jasmine, stay out of this,’ Dominic says, a warning note in his voice. Not unfriendly but needing to keep control of the situation. To keep control of me, in other words.
She’s still holding the bag containing the Scrabble letters. She dumps it in the box, then shakes her head.
‘I can’t do that, sorry,’ she says, and pushes her hair back with an impatient gesture. ‘You don’t understand, none of you. Some of this is my fault.’ She takes a shaky breath. ‘Maybe all of it.’
Chapter Forty-Five
I raise my eyebrows. ‘How so?’
‘I told you about the postcard. I shouldn’t have done that. That’s what triggered this relapse, isn’t it? But I didn’t understand.’ Her voice rises, agonised. ‘I didn’t know. I knew you as Rachel. You came to visit us in Birmingham that time, remember? You made our lives miserable. But everyone was calling you Rachel in those days.’
‘I preferred Rachel.’ I shrug. ‘Still do.’
‘Then I was told you’d died, but Cat was okay. I thought that must be your younger sister, another cousin I’d never met. I mean, fuck, we live at the other end of the country practically, and I was only a little kid at the time.’ She’s flushed now, getting hysterical. ‘I had no idea what was going on. Someone should have told me. It wasn’t fair to keep it a secret.’
‘It was none of your business,’ my mother says coldly.
‘But if I’d known, I would never have mentioned the postcard. Not in a million years. Especially on her wedding day.’ Jasmine turns to me. ‘I mean, God, that must have been what started all this shit again. Otherwise why would you be tripping out like this so soon afterwards?’
‘Tripping out?’ I repeat, as icy as my mother but with my own special twist of crazed batshittery for added menace.
‘Flipping out, relapsing, whatever you want to call it.’
Jasmine is crying now, tears rolling down her cheeks. Tears of guilt and fear. She’s worried my parents will blame her, of course. That’s what this is really about. These are tears of self-protection. Just look at how unhappy I am about this; you can’t make matters worse by blaming me, it wouldn’t be fair. She’s so transparent, it’s embarrassing.
Jasmine sees me looking at her, coolly dissecting her behaviour, and almost shrieks. ‘You sent the postcard. You sent it to me. So it wasn’t my fault. It was yours.’
‘Jasmine,’ my mother says, a reprimand in her voice.
I let go of Dominic’s hand and keep staring at Jasmine, playing back those words in my head.
You sent the postcard. You sent it to me.
She’s right, of course. I must have sent her that postcard signed, so provocatively, Rachel. Except I have no memory of doing it. Surely I ought to remember?
Yet it’s the only logical explanation. Like the creepy eyeball in the snow globe. Nice touch that. I congratulate myself. I pinched the snow globe from the wooden chest on the landing, procured the eyeball and posted it to myself at work. Later, I cut up my own wedding dress – it made me look fat, anyway, so it was probably a good move – and sprinkled it with animal blood for dramatic effect, then went out to work as usual, being sure to leave the bathroom window open to make it look like an intruder got in. As for the cat noises and the footsteps in the cellar . . .
Well, the mind is a strange and unpredictable thing, never entirely under our control. That’s what I love about being me. The not-knowing part.
I didn’t know I was Rachel, after all. Not until I read my father’s notebook. Or rather, I forgot that I was also Rachel. Or rather, to be completely accurate, I was induced to forget. Brainwashing, some might call what they did to me at that specialist clinic in Switzerland. I don’t remember much of that either, to be fair. It’s all a blur of snow and white rooms and pills. Pills every day. And yoga therapy.
God, I’d forgotten about the yoga. How weird.
So yes, I did it all, I hold my hands up to that naughtiness. I masterminded my own relapse. Because I was sick of being goody-two-shoes Catherine, and wanted badass Rachel back in my life.
‘Sorry about that,’ I say. I pick up the wine bottle, my mouth suddenly dry. It’s empty, of course. ‘Shit. Out of wine. Did I do that?’
I place the bottle back on the kitchen worktop but somehow miss the edge. Or maybe I deliberately miss it. I can’t be sure which, afterwards. But it drops to the tiled kitchen floor, where of course it shatters.
Glass explodes across the floor.